I assume you mean the quality is quietly reduced without notifying the consumer? I’ve heard Cheapflation and Skimpflation.
“Cheapflation” sounds exactly like what I was thinking of. https://www.brusselstimes.com/1021212/not-so-fishy-fish-sticks-what-is-cheapflation-and-what-to-pay-attention-to
In Albert Heijn’s fish sticks, the fish content dropped from 75% to 55%.
Eeewwww
That’s what I originally thought, but I’ve only seen that term for tech stuff. Wikipedia describes it as “a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality”.
I’ve see it used a lot recently to describe the general degradation of quality in service of increasing profits. I think technically, it is not enshittification. Below is my general definition of the process enshittification describes. Repost from another comment.
- Attract users/customers with high quality services/products to create a captive/dependent user base.
- Attract business customers (ex. advertisers or businesses that can benefit from access to the user base in some way) by offering them high value services by fucking over your captive user base create a captive/dependent busiess customer base.
- Fuck over your captive business customers to increase your own profit.
A word that includes the word “shit” in it has a very nice ring to it when describing things getting generally shittier in favor of profit. I suppose language can evolve rapidly and things mean what people believe them to mean.
Edit: As per Wikipedia’s Shrinkflation Entry:
Skimpflation involves a reformulation or other reduction in quality.
I see skimpflation as a form of shrinkflation. The idea is still that the price stays the same but to try and hide the cost increase from the customer they give you less. I guess fewer strawberries per “smoothie” is even more subtle than fewer ounces of the original “smoothie” formula per bottle.
“Great news taste”
Or
“New and improved”
The reason I ask, is I noticed that Naked brand Strawberry Banana drinks now taste like regular juice, instead of having a thick smoothie taste. They used to advertise that each small bottle contained 22 strawberries, also listing the primary ingredient as strawberry puree. They now say each bottle is 6 and 3/4 strawberries, with the primary ingredient being apple juice. Strawberry puree is now listed as the 3rd ingredient.
Is there a term for when a manufacturer changes ingredients so drastically that it just ruins the original product? I’ve heard “enshitification” before, but always associated that with tech.
In before someone says Naked is all sugar and isn’t worth drinking in the first place.
Its still referred to as shrinkflation as i have seen it used. Putting filler material is just hiding the shrinkage, but the motivators and the result is the same
Shrinkflation is smaller quantities and/or higher prices. This is actually tracked in a variety of places.
Changing to a cheaper recipe/supplier is very hard to put metrics on, and isn’t tracked anywhere that I know of
Right, by design. But when your are talking about the phenomenon casually, because the purpose and result is the same, shrinkflation seems to suffice. Are you asking for the name of the phenomena in the context of a detailed study? For that i am not sure it has a term it’s own.
Strictly speaking this is a subset of what the food industry calls reformulation. They’ll also reformulate a product for other reasons (eg to reduce sugar/fat/salt or add a vitamin so they can make a health claim, tweak the flavour if it isn’t performing well, etc) but reducing materials and manufacturing costs is a big part of it. Maybe we can coin the term “deformulation”.
I’d argue that this qualifies as enshittification.
General enshittification, which is a consequence of declining Capitalism and the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall.
To be a pedantic asshole, technically enshittification is meant to refer to online services that follow an inevitable process of…
- Attract users/customers with high quality services/products to create a captive/dependent user base.
- Attract business customers (ex. advertisers or businesses that can benefit from access to the user base in some way) by offering them high value services by fucking over your captive user base create a captive/dependent busiess customer base.
- Fuck over your captive business customers to increase your own profit.
Admittedly, I see enshittification used colloquially meaning basically “business found a way to fuck over its customers more than usual to increase their profit”. Perhaps that is what you mean by “General enshittification”.
Admittedly, I see enshittification used colloquially meaning basically “business found a way to fuck over its customers more than usual to increase their profit”. Perhaps that is what you mean by “General enshittification”.
Correct, because the “traditional” definition you outlined with the 3 points is ultimately the same process with the same mechanics and same vectors of force.
the same process
It doesn’t necessarily involve the middle man, who is ultimately the bigger fish that enshittifiers are looking to land. I think that’s relevant. Enshittification’s process involves capturing both a “retail” user base and a business user base and then squeezing both.
Edit. Enshittification is layered and more specific to industries and markets that are not inherently profitable. It starts with seed money being burned for that initial user base and fucks over everyone up and down the chain because the business is not really profitable otherwise. Skimp/shrinkflation is more about squeezing more profit than you are already making.
